Up until the advent of Nasser and the 1956 War, a thriving and diverse Jewry lived in Egypt – mainly in the two cities of Alexandria and Cairo, heavily influencing the social and cultural history of the country. Histories of the Jews of Egypt argues that this Jewish diaspora should be viewed as "an imagined bourgeoisie". It demonstrates how, from the late nineteenth century up to the 1950s, a resilient bourgeois imaginary developed and influenced the lives of Egyptian Jews both in the public arena, in institutions such as the school, and in the home. From the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Cairo lycée français to Alexandrian marriage contracts and interwar Zionist newspapers – this book explains how this imaginary was characterised by a great capacity to adapt to the evolutions of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt, but later deteriorated alongside increasingly strong Arab nationalism and the political upheavals that the country experienced from the 1940s onwards. Offering a novel perspective on the history of modern Egypt and its Jews, and unravelling too often forgotten episodes and personalities which contributed to the making of an incredibly diverse and lively Jewish diaspora at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East, this book is of interest to scholars of Modern Egypt, Jewish History and of Mediterranean History.

This beautifully illustrated volume looks at the spaces created by and for Jews in areas under the political or religious control of Muslims. Covering regions as diverse as Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, it asks how the architecture of synagogues responded to contextual issues and traditions, and how these contexts influenced the design and evolution of synagogues. As well as revealing how synagogues reflect the culture of the Jewish minority at macro and micro scales, from the city to the interior, the book also considers patterns of the development of synagogues in urban contexts and in connection with urban elements and monuments.

"Leading authorities survey Jewish history from its beginnings down to the 20th century: the earliest days before the Exile; the Jewish polity in its encounters with the Great Powers of the ancient world ; Jewish life after the destruction of the Jewish state under Christianity and Islam; the impact of the Enlightenment on Jewish thought and traditions; the Jewish experience in 19th- and 20th-century Europe; the rise and development of American Jewry; the appearance of Zionism and its culmination in the foundation of Israel. That is the 'outer' history. But there is another, 'inner' history without which the first is meaningless. Equal space in this volume is therefore devoted to the Bible, the Talmud, to Jewish philosophy and mysticism, to imaginative literature--both poetry and fiction-- in Hebrew, and to the challenge of modernity and the way in which Judaism as a system of thought and belief has tried to cope with it"--Jacket.